Monthly Archives: May 2014

A prestigious research institute in France said it had lost thousands of tubes of samples of the deadly Sars coronavirus.

A routine inventory check at Paris’ Pasteur Institute revealed that 2,349 tubes containing fragments of the virus responsible for the deaths of 774 people in 2002 were missing, the centre named after French chemist Louis Pasteur said.

The institute was quick to reassure the public and said that the contents of the missing vials had no infectious potential. They contained only part of the virus and had no ability to spread.

“Independent experts referred by health authorities have qualified such potential as ‘non-existing’ according to the available evidence and literature on the survival of the Sars virus,” the institute said.

In 2002 more than 8,000 people were infected by a pandemic of Sars – severe acute respiratorysyndrome. The virus spread from China through Hong Kong and on to other countries before it was eventually brought under control.

It is not clear how the tubes disappeared from one of the institute’s safest laboratories. Management were made aware of the loss in January, Le Monde newspaper reported.

For weeks, staff at the institute tried to find the missing vials, general director Christian Bréchot said.

ANNAPOLIS, Md., May 29, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — PharmAthene, Inc. (NYSE MKT: PIP) announced today that new analytical data from the Company’s SparVax® anthrax vaccine program were presented at the 114th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), held recently in Boston, Massachusetts. In a poster presentation entitled “Evidence Correlating Changes in Structure and Biological Activity for a Recombinant Protective Antigen (rPA) Anthrax Vaccine,” Dr. Bradford Powell, Director, Analytical Sciences at PharmAthene, presented the Company’s achievements in developing new analytical methods to measure how changes in the structural characteristics of rPA impact the potency and stability of the vaccine product, an important requirement for licensure by the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Specifically, deamidation of rPA has been identified as the major pathway of degradation, and methods were developed to assess the state of deamidation over time and its relationship to vaccine potency. The results of the study confirmed a strong positive correlation between the structural and functional stability of rPA.

Researchers have developed the first mobile application for Android phones that analyses ab1 DNA sequencing files, which enables science professionals and amateur enthusiasts to engage in scientific analysis on the go, from the convenience of their…

On the third anniversary of filing a petition to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to have antibiotic-resistant Salmonella declared an adulterant, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is still waiting for a response.

Policy researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI), the University of Virginia, and EMBO today released a report detailing the challenges faced by regulators with the increased use of more sophisticated synthetic biology technologies to…

Four years after being introduced in the New Zealand Parliament, lawmakers on Tuesday unanimously passed a new food safety law designed to beef up regulatory authority, tighten provisions for product recalls, respond more quickly to outbreaks and…

A developing model of infectious disease shows that most epidemics — AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease — are a result of things people do to nature. (“60% of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic” | NYT Op by J.